Miscellany

This is the ruin of a church we passed by while walking around Cologne in 1995. Never have figured out what church it was or what's happened to it since. The photo is "ruined" because the 35mm camera I borrowed from my brother for the summer experienced some unfortunate trouble with the film advance mechanism, causing occasional double-exposure hiccups like this. Converting to grayscale and performing various adjustments rescued part of the righthand half of the image, the rest I cropped off. You can see the split at the line between the two gables.

It's funny the life lessons you can learn from a box of dog treats.

This bird smacked into my patio door so hard it sounded like a gunshot. Small wonder it didn't survive the encounter. Cropped and slightly desaturated for effect.

The light at the end of the tunnel.

Experimenting with long exposure and my new tripod.

A row of Christmas candles on the fireplace. I bumped the overall gamma up a bit to bring out the mossy rock background, but the color is all natural.

Garland, lights, and the titular ornament, hanging above the fireplace.

About every six months, a mouse will find its way into my house. They are usually met with all-out, scorched-earth chemical warfare, but as you can tell by the poison block he'd been gnawing on for the past week, this guy was some sort of mutant übermaus who not only ate the stuff but played with the block like a cat. The last straw was when he pushed it down the stairs in the middle of the night, and it banged against my bedroom door at 4:00am with a sound like a gunshot. The mouse had to die. And it just happens that even the poison-eating übermaus was no match for a clip trap and a little dab of margarine.